In the “Great Game of Business”, it is important to provide a valuable service to society, make a difference in someone’s life, and try to have some fun while doing it.
In 1971 NAVCO started its existence as “New England Video” by a young upstart by the name of Mike Parker. He went to the local bank, with his father who knew the manager, put the pink slip of his car down for collateral, and got a loan for $5000 to buy inventory for his new venture: to install and service video tape machines and cameras in banks to replace unreliable “on demand” film cameras. The mission then, as it continues to this day, was to provide the right technologies and services to help our customers run their business better.
I started working for NAVCO in 1986, 14 years after the name change to North American Video Corporation (dba NAVCO). I have been blessed to have known all of the past owners of NAVCO, heard their stories, and how NAVCO changed their lives for the better. We have a lot of great stories and successes in the last 35 years I have witnessed, and I am sure there will be a lot more stories in the decades to come.
The future is even more exciting than our past. Cameras, software analytics, Access Control and other monitoring systems are all getting better, more robust, more complicated, and in constant need of experts to ensure they are deployed correctly, as hack proof as possible, and always working and changing as needed. We are bringing in new young visionaries to our industry that are realizing that we can make a difference in society through what we do for our customers. Added remote services continue to be offered and embraced by our customers that are also re-inventing their Security and Loss Prevention departments to take advantage of cloud connectivity, network bandwidths, custom integrations, and more valuable data to act upon.
Today, just like in 1971, our focus is on providing the best technology available for our customers while developing expert employees that love and excel at what they do. We have expanded that entrepreneurial mentality to all our employees. We continue to be 100% privately owned, with top executives owning the majority while giving 48% of the company to all employees through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). Every employee today knows that it is in their best interest to do their best for our customers, so our customers grow as we grow.
So today, we are winning at “The Great Game of Business”. We are providing a valuable service to society, making a difference in both our employees’ and customers’ lives, and are having some fun doing it. We now have hundreds of employee/owners doing that every day, and we continue to grow with those goals in mind. I read a book by the same name way back in 1996 by Jack Stack. It was all about how to engage employees through open-book management and sharing in successes. Thank you, Jack, among many others, for the ideas then, that have helped NAVCO evolve as it has over the years. Growth when everyone wins is a wonderful thing.
About the Author:
Jim Kauker, CEO. 30 plus years in the Electronic Security marketplace, providing solutions to the banking, retail and commercial marketplace. NAVCO specializes in delivering tools that positively affect how our customers perform their Operational, Loss Prevention, Security and C suite goals by giving them video and data based analytics to work with.
